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Get ready to start building: The ESPHome Starter Kit is here!
Aug 12, 2026<br>Paulus Schoutsen<br>President of the Open Home Foundation
Back in April during State of the Open Home 2026, we gave you a sneak peek of ESPHome’s very first official<br>product… And after months of hard work alongside the community, the ESPHome Starter Kit is here! 🎉
Designed and produced by Apollo Automation, the<br>Open Home Foundation’s second commercial partner, the kit is the easiest way<br>to start building your own smart home devices. Affordable and packed with all the components you need, the Starter<br>Kit invites everyone, not just seasoned tinkerers, to begin building.
A tiny house for big ideas.<br>Time to start creating<br>Section titled “Time to start creating”
Ever wanted to build your own smart home device, but didn’t know where to begin? Between chips, pins, soldering<br>irons, and breadboards – sourcing the right hardware can stop a project getting off the ground. Not to mention time<br>spent ensuring the parts are compatible, and working out how to wire them together.
That’s where the Starter Kit comes in. With no soldering, breadboarding, or coding experience needed, the kit<br>equips you with all you need to stop just using smart home tech, and start creating it.
What’s in the box?<br>Section titled “What’s in the box?”
A box packed with possibilities.<br>The ESPHome Starter Kit arrives with four modules to build with:
Motion sensor – to detect movement, making a perfect first automation
Temperature and humidity sensor – to reliably track a room’s comfort level
Notification module – to provide alerts via a buzzer and ten individually controllable RGB LEDs that glow<br>through the ESPHome logo
Button module – to trigger any automation you like
Powering it all is an ESP32-C6 microcontroller, which, for anyone new to electronics, is the programmable chip that<br>acts as the “brain” of your project. ESPHome builds the software that runs on this chip, letting it control the four<br>modules and talk to Home Assistant or any other smart home platform that supports it.
You’ll also find everything you need to put it all together: the flat ribbon cables that connect each module to the<br>board (with a spare in the box, so you’re covered if one goes astray), and a stand to show off the notification<br>module and its glowing ESPHome logo. It runs on a standard USB-C cable, and uses the same open standards as the rest<br>of your smart home, so there’s nothing special to buy before you get started: it works with your existing Home<br>Assistant setup straight out of the box.
Snap into action<br>Section titled “Snap into action”
The kit arrives with a snap-apart panel, with each module attached by small breakaway tabs. Instead of soldering<br>joints and wiring breadboards, you simply snap a module off the panel and connect it to the main board via the flat<br>ribbon cable.
The kit’s pieces (left) and how they come together.<br>And because every module connects the same way, they’re completely interchangeable: pop one off, snap the next one<br>on, install new software on your ESP microcontroller, and you’ve got a different device.
This kit is designed to be experimented with. You can reconfigure it as your ideas grow, and adapt it as you learn,<br>so the same hardware carries you from your very first project to your tenth. Each build works as a standalone device<br>right away, and if you find yourself ready to explore more complex automations, it drops straight into Home<br>Assistant.
A kit for keeps<br>Section titled “A kit for keeps”
Most learning kits end up the same way: forgotten in a drawer. But Apollo Automation co-founders Trevor Schirmer and<br>Justin Bunton had other ideas: they wanted to create something sustainable that helped more people experience the<br>joy of building, and left them with devices that remained useful long after the basics had clicked.
That’s why every module in the ESPHome Starter Kit becomes a custom, working smart home device: the kind you can’t<br>buy off the shelf. Shaped by you to fit your home and habits, each device becomes yours in every sense – run locally<br>with no cloud dependency, so your data stays in your home instead of on someone else’s server. And it’s easier than<br>you might think…
One of the core requirements for the kit was that you had something useful at the end. One of the foundation’s<br>principles is sustainability. So, this isn’t something that you just buy, learn, and then put in a drawer or the<br>trash never to be seen again. You can make real usable products out of this at the end. … For example, you could<br>use the motion module to turn on the lights when somebody walks into your room, or you could use the ESPHome-shaped<br>LEDs to turn red when you’re in a meeting, letting others in your home know…
— Trevor Schirmer, Co-Founder of Apollo Automation
Your trusty guide…<br>Section titled...